Sunday, November 16, 2014

I'm happy to declare that Blogathon Canada 2014 is now off and running! This week-long festival, organized by Sew Sisters, celebrates quilting in Canada and its on-line community. We're starting off in BC, with me and Stacey in Stitches as today's hosts. My job is to say a bit about myself, and to lead you to some other provincial talent. Plus, I get to offer a great giveaway!

I'm Jessica, and I started quilting over twenty years ago. I discovered Japanese quilts and fabrics early on, and they have been my special passion ever since. The internet made it possible for me to acquire far too many kimono silks and other traditional Japanese fabrics, so in 2008, I opened an Etsy shop, Momiji Studio, to sell bags and other items made from my stash. "Momiji" means maple in Japanese, so as an immigrant, I named my shop in honour of the land of the maple leaf. Shibori indigo dyeing is my latest obsession, as anyone who has read my blog over the past year knows. A few days ago, I finally finished my first quilt top made with the fabrics that I dyed in the summer:

There were some scraps and a couple of blocks that didn't make it into the quilt...

...so I immediately decided to make them into a mini-quilt!

It's not quite done yet--I still have to sew down the binding on the back and then make a label with the tiny bits of leftovers that still remain. I confess to cheating just a little bit--the quilt top didn't seem quite finished when I ran out of scraps, so I went back to the stash for the dark strip running across the top. That final bit really did turn out to be the pièce de résistance!

For more on my creative process and other quilts, there's a post from the "Around the World Blog Hop" back in October, and you're welcome to take a peek at my studio as well. I'm also a founding member of the Vancouver Modern Quilt Guild, which provides a wonderful, fun, energetic, and creative home for the fabric-obsessed. If you're ever in Vancouver on the third Monday of the month, please come and visit us!

For more BC-based quilting talent, check out the blogs below, as well as the links on Stacey in Stitches, my fellow host today for Blogathon Canada:

If you want a closer look at these fabrics, click here. I love the fun, airy, light-hearted, yet elegant look of these designs.

The giveaway is open to anyone in the world with a mailing address. To enter, please comment below before 11:59 p.m. PST, on Nov. 23. If you are a no-reply blogger, make certain to leave your email address in your comment--if I pull your number but can't contact you, I'll have to draw another number. I'll announce the lucky winner on Nov. 24!

You'll find opportunities to win more stash over at Stacey in Stitches, as well as an exciting giveaway from Aurifil over on the Sew Sisters blog, so hop on over and continue the fun!

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

A couple of weekends ago, I had the opportunity to take a Maiwa workshop on adire eleko (cassava resist) and batik dyeing with Gasali Adeyemo. Gasali is a wonderful dyer and part of a generation of Nigerian textile artists who are working to preserve and perpetuate traditional Yoruba indigo dyeing techniques, as well as explore new possibilities within Yoruba idioms. His work is truly beautiful, and I couldn't resist splurging on one of his large pieces of adire eleko:

Adire eleko uses cassava paste, applied with a chicken feather or a straw from a broom stick, to lay down a resist. The resist is somewhat permeable, which results in the blue-on-blue patterning, rather than the higher contrast of batik.

Gasali's sample: adire eleko, prior to dyeing

My own amateurish efforts, which betray a decidedly shaky hand, suffer even more by comparison (indeed, it's not worth comparing). I don't actually draw all that well with a pencil, much less a chicken feather, but I had fun giving adire eleko a try. The resist is hard to lay down--sort of like trying to draw a bead with caulk, which I'm also bad at. Batik was a little easier for me, although I had a hard time knowing whether the wax on my foam "pen" was hot enough to apply, and I certainly couldn't produce consistently fine lines. I'm embarrassed to show my adire eleko and batik samples, but here they are anyway:

adire eleko sample

adire eleko, sample 2

batik sample

At least my work conveys how difficult it is to apply these techniques in a refined manner, and how much practice it takes. Gasali's artistry is truly impressive!

Gasali's batik demo: such skilled and confident lines!

In the classroom, Gasali deliberately adopts a slower pace, and he approaches both indigo dyeing and life with a warm and happy attitude. He also makes sure that students learn about the place of indigo and textiles in Yoruba culture, rather than focusing purely on techniques. We learned a few words of Yoruba, and we spent some time just sitting around and having a relaxed conversation about Gasali's home village and life in Nigeria. Gasali also told us a lot about the work of the Nike Center for Art and Culture (Nike: first syllable--ee as in "leek"; second syllable like "kay"), founded by Nike Davies Okundaye to revive traditional Yoruba arts. Gasali studied there, and he now works out of his own studio in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

The two-day workshop was a welcome break from my too-busy and frenetic way of things, and a reminder of the virtues of slowing down for a bit and taking the time to truly appreciate and enjoy life. Instead of feeling tired from a hard day's work, I left each day of the class feeling re-energized and inspired. Indeed, I made further progress on my indigo quilt top in the evenings after the workshop, as well as nearly every day for the past two weeks. What a wonderful experience!

Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Remember my bucket o' shibori from a while back? On Thanksgiving weekend a few weeks ago, I set up an indoor vat so that I could do one final round of dyeing for the season. I didn't love the experience of dyeing indoors in cramped quarters, but it was fun to get the end results. Here I'll just show a few of the highlights.

Kumo knots, randomly tied:

Two pieces of shirokage (white shadow):

Tesuji (pleated shibori, tied and bound to a rope) willow variant:

Leaf clusters made with a combination of stitched shibori, orinui shibori, and kumo tying:

Towards the end of the summer, I wanted to do more pole-wrapping, so I dyed a number of arashi and bomaki pieces with different techniques. Here I'll just show off three of them. The first was done with bomaki, with the fabric sewn into a tube that fit the pipe pretty tightly before I cinched it up and twisted it a bit. The result was a finer series of lines compared to other pieces I've done with this technique:

close-up

I did another piece of bomaki with the excess fabric
along the edge facing the inside of the tube, and then, after I cinched
up the fabric, I also wound string around the tube to try and create
some breaks in the lines. The resulting effect was subtle, but I like
it:

Finally, I dyed a piece of arashi shibori with a criss-cross pattern:

Can you figure out the technique? I actually dyed the piece once before, so it already had a series of diagonal lines. I wound it on the pipe again in the other direction, wrapped it with string, cinched it up, and dyed it again to form the criss-cross pattern.

In other news, Blogathon Canada is on the horizon, and I'll be hosting this year! For more details, click here. I'll be posting as part of the Blogathon on Nov. 17, with a great giveaway as well--stay tuned!

Finally, I've made some significant progress on the indigo quilt. I don't have a good photograph, thanks to all the dark, gray weather that we're having, so I'll save that update for another time. Let's just say that a couple of the Thanksgiving indigo fabrics have already made it up on the design wall.

Monday, November 3, 2014

Blogathon Canada is coming up, and yours truly will be one of this year's hosts! Sew Sisters, a wonderful Toronto-based quilt shop, is sponsoring this online festival for the third year running in order to celebrate quilting in Canada (hooray for the land of the maple leaf!). For each day of the Blogathon, two quilters will post about their own work and also provide links to quilters in their home provinces. Fun and exciting giveaways will abound as well! Giveaways will take place in both the individual quilters' blog entries and on the Sew Sisters blog, thanks to the generosity of Aurifil, Northcott, and Robert Kaufman, along with Sew Sisters. (Breaking news on 11/7--Camelot Fabrics and Timeless Treasures have joined in as well--I'm giddy at the thought of all of the forthcoming giveaways!) If you're a Canadian blogger, you can link up as well: see the Blogathon announcement over at Sew Sisters for details. I don't know exactly what's in store, so I'm waiting with just as much anticipation as everyone else!

Check back in a couple of weeks to join in on all the fun, and maybe even win some awesome fabric or other stash. Many thanks to Sew Sisters for organizing this fabulous event--I'm looking forward to playing my part!

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About me

Apart from the career that keeps a roof over my head, I am a quilter, crafter, and general fabriholic. I live in beautiful Vancouver, BC, where I spend as much time as possible in my sewing studio working with an overflowing collection of cottons, silks, and other textiles. Even with more than twenty years of quilting experience, I am still learning with every quilt I make.